The West End show’s former lead actors will travel back in their careers to share the role with its current star for the 1985 film’s anniversary

Audiences at the West End musical Back to the Future will see three actors play Marty McFly in a single evening next month.

To mark the 40th anniversary of the original film’s release, two of the musical’s former lead actors, Olly Dobson and Ben Joyce, will return to share the part with its current star, Caden Brauch, on 3 December at the Adelphi theatre. The show will begin with Joyce as the teenage time-traveller before Brauch takes over for the middle section and Dobson ends in the role. All three will then perform the final number, Back in Time, together.

‘You’ve done this before,’ comedian told president, who ranted about Kimmel online and demanded his firing

Early on Thursday morning, Donald Trump made another plea for ABC to fire the late-night comedian Jimmy Kimmel , writing on his Truth Social platform that he has “NO TALENT” and “VERY POOR TELEVISION RATINGS”.

On his show later that night, Kimmel was defiant, poking at the president for his previous attempt this fall to get him fired and suggesting that Trump has clearly been watching his show.

Will Quaritch, the square-jawed representative of military-industrial destruction befriend the Na’vi in James Cameron’s forthcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash? And if so, what other unlikely character about-turns should we be prepared for?

It’s almost possible to feel a little sorry for Colonel Miles Quaritch, the main villain of Avatar. Imagine: first you’re sent light years from Earth to hang out with 14ft blue space hippies, then you’re suddenly dead. Then you’re resurrected as one of the 14ft blue space hippies. And now, according to James Cameron, you might just be starting to realise that the giant tree-hugging freaks you’ve spent two films trying to erase are your kind of people after all.

Speaking to Empire in an interview last week, Cameron revealed that the Quaritch we will meet in the forthcoming Avatar: Fire and Ash (although still played by Stephen Lang) is no longer the same person we first saw stomping through the rainforest in the original 2009 film. Yes, he’s a “recombinant” – a lab-grown Na’vi reboot of a man carved out of granite and patriotism – but he’s also going through a full-blown existential wobble after discovering in the last instalment that he has a human son, Spider. “Quaritch is undergoing an identity crisis,” said Cameron. “His interest in the biological son of his biological precursor form is all about trying to define, ‘Am I a completely new person? Am I bound by the rules and the behaviours of the person whose memories and personality I was imprinted with?’ It’s a true existential dilemma for him in the philosophical sense.”

He may now live in Germany, but he loves returning to Britain, not just to put on a show, but to enjoy the weather, the food, the humour – and the selfie-takers in galleries

Let’s suppose that you are a Turner prize-winning sculptor, with more than 50 years in the game. One restless night, an idea comes to you. You work it up in your studio and send it off to the foundry, to be cast in bronze. Finally, you’re ready to show it to the world, but the first person through the gallery doors barely glances at it before taking a selfie with it. What do you do? Bear in mind that you are Tony Cragg, Royal Academician, and you are on record bemoaning the preference of many art-lovers for listening to audio guides as they tour exhibitions.

The perhaps unlikely answer is that you welcome the selfie-taker with outstretched arms, or at least give a convincing impression of doing so. “No, I don’t have problem with that,” says Cragg, albeit faintly, as if he’s thinking about the people who might be crossing the threshold of his latest show, which just opened in London. “People are bound to respond in different ways.”

As the loneliness epidemic worsens, young people are finding themselves and each other through the thriving culture of medieval and renaissance fairs

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“I dunno what to tell ya, mate,” a young knight once told me through his helm’s lifted visor. “Gettin’ shield bashed just feels good.”

For the knaves among thee, a “shield bash” is what it sounds like: to bash, or be bashed, with a shield. It’s simple and to the point, like a mace to the face or an arrow to the knee. Witnessing a shield bash, you understand the “haha yesss” that the basher must feel upon bashing, just as you empathetically presume a long “oh noooooo” on behalf of the bashee. So I was surprised to learn being bashed was, in itself, just as fun.

Royal Festival Hall, London
Tenor Nicky Spence was the comic ringleader in this all-singing all-dancing Hollywood-ready work that was anything but subtle

On 20 September 1973, about 90 million people turned on their televisions to watch the “ Battle of the Sexes ” – a tennis match between the loudly chauvinist former men’s champion Bobby Riggs and the reigning women’s No 1, Billie Jean King. She arrived on a litter carried by topless men; he on a rickshaw drawn by female models. He presented her with a novelty-size lollipop. She handed him a piglet.

“The Battle of the Sexes was always an opera,” says composer Laura Karpman in the programme for the world premiere of the orchestral version of her stage work Balls. At its subtlest, the opera gets straight to the heart of how alien that real event now seems. Incorporating video clips of adverts and near-verbatim quotes of the 1973 TV commentary – virtuosically delivered as a kind of slow rap by actor Emma Kennedy in a wig, sideburns and shades – Karpman’s score transforms the shock of cigarettes “tailored for the feminine hand” and female athletes greeted as “little lady” into all-singing all-dancing kitsch.

Alice and Ellen Kessler, who died by joint assisted suicide this week, entertained – and occasionally scandalised – Europe with their glitzy and subversive pop music and classically informed dance

• The Kessler twins die together aged 89 – news

When Dean Martin announced the Kessler sisters’ appearance on his show in 1966 , he remarked that he had been desperate to book them not just because the German-born dancer-singers were “so pretty and so talented”, but “also because they’re twins, that means there are two of them”. “They’re a double,” he added with a nod to his half-drunk crooner persona, “and there’s nothing I like more than a double”.

The two sisters, who died by joint assisted suicide earlier this week, also performed with Frank Sinatra, Harry Belafonte and Fred Astaire, but the American market never impressed them much. In 1964 they turned down a role in Elvis’s Viva Las Vegas for fear of being pigeonholed in American musical comedies.

Birmingham Rep
Humphrey Ker and David Reed’s witty thriller blends Victorian sleuthing, meta gags and new songs by the great musical-theatre duo

A serial killer working through the alphabet (Agatha Christie’s The ABC Murders) or Catholicism’s list of gravest sins (David Fincher’s Seven) gives a plot momentum and audiences the pleasure of anticipating who or what might be next.

And such is enjoyably the case in Birmingham’s Christmas show, where a seasonally lethal bad actor (in the policing rather than theatrical sense) is wiping out people in line with the 18th-century song The 12 Days of Christmas. While maids a-milking, swans a-swimming and the rest might plausibly be found in English crime fiction’s favourite setting of a village, co-writers Humphrey Ker and David Reed set the deadly dozen in Victorian theatreland, where a performer embodying one of the song’s elements (Mother Goose, Swan Lake etc) is threatened each evening.

He has penned hits for Adele, Dua Lipa and Bieber, but the sought-after Canadian pop songwriter has only ever released one album himself. Now, 10 years on, comes a second –and it’s a scorching account of a breakup

Goon, the 2015 debut album by Canada-born LA musician Tobias Jesso Jr, was one of the revelations of the 2010s. An album of heartfelt, earnest ballads in the vein of 70s singer-songwriters such as Randy Newman and Harry Nilsson, it instantly established Jesso as a rising indie star and was one of the year’s most acclaimed records. The problem was that Jesso didn’t care much for the attention: he struggled to feel like a genuine performer, leading him to drink heavily before shows, and felt he was playing a version of himself in interviews. “I was forced to do all these things I wasn’t really confident in,” he says. “I was just like … I don’t know what I’m doing, anywhere.” So, toward the end of his breakout year, he cancelled all future shows and, in essence, put his career on ice.

In the decade that followed, he kept himself behind the scenes, in the process becoming one of the world’s most successful and in-demand pop songwriters – thanks, in no small part, to his focus on simple, emotions-first songwriting. He co-wrote Adele’s hit When We Were Young and a handful of tracks on Dua Lipa’s 2024 album Radical Optimism ; has collaborated with Harry Styles, Justin Bieber, FKA twigs and Haim; and in 2023 won the first ever Grammy for songwriter of the year.